Credit Scoring Using Machine Learning by Combing Social Network Information: Evidence from Peer-to-Peer Lending

Financial institutions use credit scoring to evaluate potential loan default risks. However, insufficient credit information limits the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform's capacity to build effective credit scoring. In recent years, many types of data are used for credit scoring to compensate for the lack of credit history data. Whether social network information can be used to strengthen financial institutions' predictive power has received much attention in the industry and academia. The aim of this study is to test the reliability of social network information in predicting loan default. We extract borrowers' social network information from mobile phones and then use logistic regression to test the relationship between social network information and loan default. Three machine learning algorithms-random forest, AdaBoost, and LightGBM-were constructed to demonstrate the predictive performance of social network information. The logistic regression results show that there is a statistically significant correlation between social network information and loan default. The machine learning algorithm results show that social network information can improve loan default prediction performance significantly. The experiment results suggest that social network information is valuable for credit scoring.